I think that's great.

I don't want the elitist "art" culture in movies to spread to videogames. I'll choose a game that's fun to play over a game that's "art" any day.

By all means name them.  What games from the old days still stand up today?  What games from the NES era can still be appreciated by all age groups today?  I'm sure anybody could pick up Tertris and become addicted to it, I'm sure some of the early Nintendo classics could be timeless wonders for the newest of gamers, but what does that leave?  Art needs to be something that transcends time.  Picasso, DaVinci, and Van Gogh (among others) are still revered today because what they did is amazing even today.  Starry Night, when viewed critically, puts the almost every painting made in the last 20 years to shame.  What game made ~20 years ago puts almost every game made this year to shame?  How many games, honestly, made in the NES era are going to out live current games as classics?  20 years from now, the Mario 3s and Zeldas and Tetrises will stand up and so too will the Okamis and Katamaris and Icos and Mario 64s/Galaxies and Zelda OoTs and GeoWs and Heavy Rains and Halos and a whole lote more later games.  Gaming has only gotten better, and only the praise given to originators and the lack there of given to evolutions can make it even remotely seem otherwise.  Very few games made in the modern age will be held as art in the upcomming years, but even fewer of the games that came before will be.  Most will jsut be remembered as the first and never the best.

Err, got to say I disagree with you on a few things.  One, you're wrong (I'm afraid factually vs opinion) if arguing all great Art is successful.  Many artists, across many forms from sculpture to canvas, were commercially unsuccessful during their lives.  In some cases their works ended up with a high value many years later, but of course there also remains plenty of great Art that wasn't a huge commercial success.  You simply cannot say commercial success = successful Art.  I'd also note that often short term commercial success tends not to lead to long term critical and commercial success.  Blockbuster movies, airport page turners, etc. all tend to date pretty quickly and fade from view.

I also disagree with your statement films are primarily to entertain.  They can do, and I'm very happy that is one use of the medium.  But it is by no means their primary aim IHMO.  What you're simply describing is the fact that the more commercial films tend to be more successful.  Or maybe you think Transformers 2 is Art?  I don't.  I believe in US this is a very strong of view of films, but I don't take US as representative of the world, only itself.  In Europe in many countries film remains as much an Art form as an entertainment, which is IMHO a preferable place to be.

What it comes down to (the fact one man's Art is another's junk) is that the aim of something using the same form may be different.

A sculpture may exist purely as Art, not intended to sell for huge sums nor make the artist rich and famous.  Sculptures can also be churned off an assembly line to sell as souveniers, purely for commerce.

A film may exist essentially as Art (most Kubrick movies spring to mind, or Lars von Trier or David Lynch) whiile others are purely commercial in nature - hello Transformers 2 again.

A novel may exist primarly as Art, or it might be an Airport blockbuster written from the get go simply to entertain and make a lot of money.

The same goes for canvas, music, etc.

You cannot state that the commercial use of a medium defines its most successful artistic efforts - in fact, in most cases it's the other way around.

I therefore see videogames as no different.  There is no reason you couldn't use the medium to produce Art (so I'd disagree, very gently, with say Roger Ebert there, as by definition anything can be used for Art), however I'd say that very few really try to.  Right now Videogames are primarly about commerce as entertainment - which is fine and what I was referring to in my first post.  However, there is no reason a few titles shouldn't be attempting to be a little bit more than pure entertainment - titles like Ico, or SOTC.

Nintendto I see as primarly focused on entertainment, which is fine.  As is MS.  Sony is too but they do seem to produce some of the more eclectic titles out there, for which I'm glad - Flower, ICO, etc. are real gems that manage to blend decent gameplay with actual theme and content to produce somthing akin to Art.

In the end I'd hope to see the big developers, EA, Activision, etc. adopt a policy similar to many film studios, where the big money spinners also allow funding of more interesting, smaller, artistic projects - although I won't be holding my breath on the Activision front.  Right now they are square behind commerce, I feel potentialy even at the expense of fun but hopefully not.

Of course, I could just be a well edcuated European elitist!

Oh, and Montana, I find it rather sad you'd see any notion of the videogame form being used for more than simple fun as a 'bad thing' or some form of threat.  Fun is great, it's why I do go and see good popcorn movies, read good escapist novels and play fun games.  But I firmly believe that it's a richer existence to experience both fun and a healthy dose of something a little deeper, a little more challenging.  Something that asks you to experience and consider other, less simply emotions.

It's not personal with you at all.  My personal relationship wit hgaming back in the day, however, is, and the fact that you weren't really part of it yet you act like it was some golden age is asinine.  Your opinion IS inalidated and DOES need to be corrected.  There simply weren't many, if any, games that can be considered art from the past.  Not from the NES, not from the SNES/Genesis, and not from the N64/PS1/Saturn.  It's not until the Ps2 that games even pretended to be art and even still most weren't.  Games are GAMES, not art, and while man may be as much of an art as Chess is, that number is still very, very few.

How can you dare say this isn't about one thing but it's about that thing?  It's about lazy, churned out games?  Name me a mainstream system and give me half an hour (not now, I want to sleep soon) and I can name over 100 such games with ease. Every, EVERY system has way, way, way, way, WAY more crap than it has cream and you're simply dilusional if you disagree.  You're a a self-invested fool that wants to make youself feel better if you don't realize that "crap" is the rule, not the exception, in the history of video games.

Again, for every great game you can name from the past I can name one from the present, and for my personal taste I myself would pick older gaming over newer gaming most days.  A newer gamer wouldn't give your BS the time of day.  There really, really isn't one realistic justification for the basic argument to begin with.  Take this from someone whose gaming dipped dramatically when eveything went 3D and has only gone lower since.  There's no art to the old days that isn't simply bested in the modern day and there are simplay far too many games today that are considered "midling" that absolute destroy the average game of yesteryear.  It's not a matter of taste, it's a matter of realism.  Even games I cant stand today (like most of them) as simple more deserving of credit than the vast majority of older games.  You only, maybe, win if you compare this (the 7th) generation of games to all of the others that exist before.  If you compare one gen to any one other, this is by far the the best outside of the 6th and this one isn't done yet.

@Trashleg: Your first comment was included.

The OP, as you can see, made the point of the lack of art in videogames as the lack of creativity in them. Which i do agree and which is one of the reasons why Wii is what it is, to bring back creativity, the aspect of art.

Your first comment wasn't any different from the one i replied to. The first comment was about complaining the crappy games on the market.

@Nordlead: You missed the point. What makes a painting art? What makes a song art? What makes a movie art? What makes a videogame art? All the art share one thing in common, which is the creativity process, but every form of art has its own individual characteristics, that make them different from another. Music can't be music if you paint it and paintings can't be painting if it's video. Videogames can't be videogames if they don't differentiate from music, movies and paintings.
One of the problems in "making videogames art" seems to be that the people who pursue the art, seem to be pursuing videogames ceasing to be videogames. There definately are videogames that can be considered as art, but they can be art and videogames only if the art is in the characterics of videogame.

@Chichirimuyo: Except that how many artists are there who aren't remembered like Leonardo, Rembrandt or Beethoven.

Art is the product of creative process and the videogames today largely lack the creativity. NES games were far more creative than the games today.

OT: ...IMO....and that is why alot of Japanese devs take longer to push a game out because they truly see it as an art and want to perfect it to the tiniest detail. Unfortunately NA is the biggest market and they're full of mindless nuts that couldnt care less about art as long as it can shoot people and blow stuff up.

The drastic increase in FPS games on console is outragous and pumping out more then on PC! (and PC was king of FPS). It seems like alot of devs just out to make the quick buck and know such game genre as FPS easily catches the consumers eyes so devs will pump out a bunch of random shooter game with whatever story and see whether itll be a hit or miss.

Gaming these days are alot like Hollywood. Hollywood is so uncreated that all their big movies, small movies are based of something, anything like comic book cause they know that sells. Game devs sees shooter games the same cause they know that sells.

Just be grateful that there are some devs that still pursue this art way and have their own creativeness. Of course 'fun' is the #1 priority... but to me its not fun just playing numerous of similar games by the barrel fun. Creativeness brings in new fun negating the old same repetitive fun.

This may be terminology, but in my view (and education if I'm honest) what makes something Art is not the creative process, although that is a common element required to achieve Art.

What makes Art is the experssion of an idea through the medium, the communication of an idea, or the generation of one or more emotions and ideally all of those.  Truly great Art, to stoop to cliche, touches the soul, it informs and enriches through it's experience.

I'm going to pick on Transformers 2 again to illustrate (sorry any die-hard Transformers 2 fans).  Transformers 2 is the result of a huge creative process, no doubt encompassing untold man-hours and a veritable army of taleneted people, whether using the creative process to:

1 - develop designs, storyboards, layouts, etc.

2- develop script

3 - film the actors, light the set, etc.

4 - the actors themselves in their performances (okay, I'm being generous here)

5 - the animation of the robots, etc. (pretty damn amazing if ultimately souless)

And many, many more.  But in this case the entire creative process was aimed at one thing, producing a commercial work aimed at a targeted demographic audience.  The final movie (I can't bring myself to call it a film, even though I normally dislike the 'movie / film' terms as much as 'casual / hardcore' terms) simply does not have one single element of true Art in it.

The creative process is a necessary step, the 'work' in a sense to create Art, but it does not guarantee Art in any way.

As another example, consider Transformers.  Still a popcorn movie, but actually a better movie than Transformers 2 in my, and thank goodness many critics I'd trust, opinion.  Using essentially the same creative process, consider the scenes in this commercial movie when the Transformers arrive, rise gracefull from swimming pools, slip delicately behind trees, etc.  Despite it's purely commercial stance those few fleeting moments do evoke some wonder and a genuine sense of mystery.  Not high Art, to use that phrase, but light years superior to jiving robots with gold teeth, no?

So the creative process I'd liken to the work involved in building a house.  But depending upon the intent, and of course the skill not just technical but artistic, that hard to pin down emphemeral ability some humans have while others don't, you might end up with an ugly, square functional house or a wonderfully attractive house.

I see this also mirroring games very well.  The creative process to create a game is little different whether the title turns out to be great or crap.  It's the skill that counts.  Of course, with games, as with films, the end result may just be entertainment.  It could be Art, but that requires something more than assembling the building blocks in a way known to simply entertain.

@Reasonable: You're not really disagreeing with me.

You did read something wrong, the great artist that died before getting recognised as great artist, became commercially successful before they were seen as great artists. Even if the artist died, they production kept living.
The point is, anyone can be an artist, but in order to get recognition as one, you need to have success commercially. This, naturally, doesn't mean that everything commercially successful would be art.

For the videogames as art, if a videogame is art, it needs to be art with the characteristics of a videogame.

No, I covered that.  I know what you mean, but not all Art that is held to be great becomes commercial.  In fact, in many cases the commercial aspect is simply to do with rarity and the nominal 'cost' of ownership.  I'd also note that this notion can be misleading as it only pertains to 'objects' whose creator is dead.  Beethoven is as artistically feted as say Van Gogh.  But due to the different medium I can buy Beethoven cheap due to the fact music is not an object while with a painting I can buy a print cheap but the original is expense.  That's not commercial success - that's collecting rare objects.  Sorry, but I really think you're mixing up commerce and Art.

In terms of 'anyone can beomce an artist' I agree, and I'd wonder your view based on a suprising intelligent children's film, Ratatouille.  The film posits the idea 'anyone can cook' as a metaphor for exactly your statement.  It them procedes to show us a number of people who can, or claim they can, cook.  I think the film rather beautifully deals with the whole concept of 'everyone can...' while addressing the actual reality of the statement - i.e. everyone can, but everyone cannot do so equally well, and only a few can truly create something more than a commercial reproduction.

As another example, consider Stanley Kubrick.  Kubrick was miles from being a huge commercial success.  His films in the main were modest successes, covering their costs with a little profit on the side.  Yet consider his standing in the film industry artistically, and the longivity his films will have.  Again, commerce has nothing to do with it (apart from funding).  His films as Art are what created his reputation, not their commercial success.  Like the painting vs music example I gave earlier, due to the different form of his medium, his works will never attain the commercial rarity of a Van Gogh, because you can buy his Art for $10 dollars if you want.

@Reasonable: It doesn't have art in it because you don't consider it as art by your personal preference. You were just using your personal preference of quality as a measure of art (example, not calling Transformers movie as art).

Now, the movie likely isn't art because it lacks the creativity. I already gave an example of copying a drawing, which is only using the creative asset in the original drawing, which most likely is the case with the Transformers movie aswell.